32. Camille
Camille
Three weeks after Tokyo, we are back in Eon Tower.
The official explanation remains a catastrophic technical failure aggravated by crowd heat and Jules’s existing injuries.
The controlled footage has outperformed the recordings we could not suppress.
Public attention has shifted from conspiracies towards whether Eon should have allowed her to perform.
Eon is not pleased.
Sponsors want compensation. Broadcast partners want guarantees. Voss wants a complete account of every contract alteration I made in Tokyo. Devin wants Midnight Halo photographed smiling together as proof the group remains stable. Cohen wants access to my residual-channel analysis.
The girls want to destroy the system.
Eon has responded with additional security, restricted archive access, and mandatory device checks.
The precautions give us time.
It also tells us Eon knows we are looking.
Tonight, long after the offices should be empty, Remy stands across from me in a private production room three floors below the Lounge.
The space is shielded against ordinary recording, courtesy of a hush charm Blaire acquired without entering it into the official inventory.
She knows we are meeting. So do Kaia, Mina, and Jules.
No more secret plans inside secret plans.
Not among us.
I work from the encrypted archive mirror I created before Eon restricted my access. Cohen announced the restriction before the new permissions took effect, leaving an interval of nineteen minutes. I used seventeen of them to copy the updated personnel, charm registries, and files.
Nothing we open tonight touches the live system.
The system does not leave gaps. That is the first rule.
If something appears to be an exception, it has been hidden, miscategorized, or deliberately obscured.
Which means that if someone survived the collapse of a previous Eon group, they escaped something designed to catch them, were kept alive because the system still had a use for them, or were never fully incorporated into it.
All three possibilities are useful.
Remy leans against the table with her arms crossed, watching the data as if it might rearrange itself under sufficient scrutiny.
We divided the archive work according to skill.
Remy took the personnel anomalies because she is better than any of us at recognizing repeated structures disguised as noise.
Kaia and Mina are reviewing the prior groups’ public timelines, while Jules is identifying personal connections the official files classify as irrelevant.
The others gave us space tonight because the personnel search produced the first viable lead.
I pull up the consolidated archive. Not the full analysis of Velour Sky, Neon Saints, and Glass Anthem.
Tonight, I am not interested in the groups.
I am interested in what the system failed to remove.
“I reran the associated-personnel search,” I say.
Remy’s gaze remains on the screen. “With the corrected classifications?”
“Yes. Eon’s archive treats performers, staff, relatives, and witnesses as separate categories. I removed the distinction.”
“And?”
“Every previous group has peripheral connections that disappear around the same time as the primary incident.”
“That isn’t surprising.”
“No. This is.”
I bring the timelines into alignment. Most of the associated names end predictably: nondisclosure agreements, relocated staff, corrected memories, severed contracts. Some continue under altered identities Eon clearly created and monitored.
A small number do neither.
Remy straightens.
“Those are the gaps,” she says.
“They were meant to look like administrative omissions.”
“But they repeat.”
“Yes.”
Systems do not repeat errors this consistently unless the errors are part of the process.
Two earlier anomalies lead nowhere. Their trails were erased too thoroughly and too long ago.
The Glass Anthem record is different. I open the file.
The missing record was not sealed or redacted. It was placed in an unrelated administrative category and detached from the primary incident file. An ordinary search would never connect it to Valencia.
Someone did not erase her.
Someone hid her badly enough to be found, provided the person searching already knew there should be something there.
I bring the name onto the screen: Elodie Bellamy.
Then I open the only surviving photograph attached to the file.
It is a few years old, taken before Glass Anthem’s final concert.
Elodie is standing beside her sister at an Eon event she was never meant to be important enough to attend.
Her light-brown hair falls in soft waves around her shoulders, held back on one side by a small pearl clip.
She wears a pale blue cardigan over a white dress scattered with tiny flowers, a sharp contrast to her sister’s severe black-and-silver stage styling.
There is nothing polished about her. No camera-ready expression or carefully manufactured distance. Her smile is small and uncertain, her cheeks softly rounded, her eyes warm enough to make the photograph feel strangely intimate.
Remy goes completely still.
Not the controlled stillness she uses when she is analyzing something. This is involuntary. Absolute.
I look from the photograph to her face.
“You know her?”
Remy does not answer immediately. Her attention remains fixed on Elodie’s name and the outdated photograph, and something shifts behind her expression.
Recognition.
“She’s alive,” Remy says. “Or at least, she was…”
The certainty matters more than the words.
I study the limited record. “How do you know?”
Remy’s jaw tightens. “Because I’ve seen her.”
“When?”
“Years ago. Before Midnight Halo debuted.”
That was not the answer I expected.
“Where?”
“At the Council main building.”
I look back at the file. “There is no record of her contacting the Council after Valencia. Are you sure it was her?”
“Yes.” Remy unfolds her arms. “Her hair was different, but her eyes are the same. I saw her in one of the lower training corridors. She was arguing with someone from the Council. I didn’t know who she was then.”
“What did you hear?”
“Almost nothing. I was a trainee. We were taught not to stop when Council staff were using a corridor.”
A useful method of discouraging witnesses without explicitly ordering silence.
Remy looks at the screen again. “But I remember her face.”
“Why?”
“She looked at me.”
The answer is quiet.
I wait.
Remy presses her fingertips against the edge of the table. “Not the way people usually looked at trainees. She wasn’t curious or impressed. She looked terrified.”
“Of you?”
“For me.”
The distinction settles between us.
“What happened after that?”
“Someone pulled her into a restricted lift. I never saw her again.”
I examine the metadata attached to the misfiled record. The last internal timestamp is eighteen months after Glass Anthem’s disappearance.
Long enough for the Council to have retained her.
Long enough for her to have learned something.
“She did not disappear immediately after Valencia,” I say.
Remy’s eyes narrow. “How long?”
“At least eighteen months.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“It does if she was kept under observation.”
“Or containment.”
“Yes.”
I expand the family linkage.
Her sister was a member of Glass Anthem, one of the four girls who outright vanished.
Remy studies the record. “Why would the Council keep her?”
“She was an unbound witness,” I say. “Close enough to the group to be exposed to the collapse, but outside the contracts. They would likely have wanted to know what she remembered.”
Remy’s jaw tightens. “For eighteen months?”
“If she was still alive, she may have been the only person left who could tell them what happened from outside the channel.”
“Was?”
“There are no medical records, death certificates, or containment reports attached to her file. Only monitoring logs that stop without explanation.”
Remy looks at the abandoned identity on the screen. “Then she escaped.”
“Or someone helped her.”
The record was not erased. It was hidden by someone who lacked the authority to delete it.
Someone inside the system chose concealment over compliance.
Another missing link.
I open the final trace attached to the file: an obsolete relocation code, a closed financial account, and a utility charm registered without a current holder.
Remy leans closer. “That charm is still active.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“The activation identifies a regional relay, not an exact location.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
I glance at her.
The resemblance is unfortunate.
“Northern California,” I say. “The last confirmed activation occurred eleven days ago.”
Remy stares at the broad location marker. “She stayed in the country.”
“Or returned.”
“Eon would have found her.”
“Not through this.”
I expand the charm registration.
The holder field is blank. Its original identification number remains, but the system classifies the charm as decommissioned inventory. Its activations are recorded as routine diagnostic signals, but no automated search associates them with Elodie.
“You found it because you already knew where the gap was,” Remy says.
“Yes. The obsolete relocation code led to the orphaned registration. Without that connection, the activation is indistinguishable from thousands of dormant Council devices reporting through the same regional relay.”
“Someone detached it from her identity.”
“And left it functional.”
I open the financial closure record.
Her accounts were not frozen by the Council. They were emptied through small withdrawals over six weeks, then formally closed. Deliberate. Patient. Human.
“Her identity was not scrubbed,” I say.
Remy understands before I finish.
“Abandoned.”
“Yes.”
She left the name behind before Eon could use it to track her.
The charm is an older ward carrier, similar to the hush charm shielding this room but designed for concealment rather than silence. The Council stopped issuing that model after Glass Anthem.
“She’s using Council magic to hide from the Council,” Remy says.
“Someone ensured the Council would no longer know it belonged to her.”
“She could know what happened to her sister. And why they kept her alive. We should locate her.”
The Council does not preserve people without purpose. If she escaped, she may have taken that purpose with her.
Remy stares at the name on the screen. “She won’t want anything to do with us.”
“Correct.”
“She’ll assume Eon sent us.”
“Likely.”
“And if she recognizes me from the Tower?”
“That may make the situation worse.”
Remy releases a humorless breath. “You’re really selling this.”
“I am identifying variables.”
“You’re identifying reasons she might slam a door in our faces.”
“That is preferable to alerting Eon by contacting her electronically.”
The smile fades as she studies the file again. “Does Blaire know about the sister yet?”
“She knows that I identified a potential survivor connected to Glass Anthem. She does not know the name or location.”
“You said no more secret plans.”
“I said we decide together what is safe to share. Blaire agreed that anything capable of identifying this woman remains outside Eon systems until we contact her.”
Remy nods slowly. “And the others?”
“Waiting upstairs.”
“For us?”
“For the answer.”
The answer is already clear.
We need information Eon cannot curate, a witness the Council failed to erase, and someone who understands what happened to a previous group from outside the performance contracts.
We need her.
I close every unnecessary file, leaving only the charm signal and the abandoned identity on the screen.
“She saw what happened before the Council finished rewriting it,” Remy says. “If anyone knows what Glass Anthem found, it’s her.”
“And if she does not?”
“Then she still knows how to disappear from Eon.”
Another useful skill.
I disconnect the tablet from the room display. The name vanishes, but the location remains fixed in my memory.
Northern California.
An active concealment charm.
A woman Eon recorded as irrelevant because admitting her significance would create a question the system could not answer.
How did she survive?
“We find her,” I say.
Not a suggestion.
A next step.
Remy watches me for a long moment. “We tell the others first.”
“Yes.”
“And Blaire gets enough to cover our absence, but nothing she has to enter into a report.”
“Yes.”
“No company transport. No phones. No traceable reservations.”
“You have been listening.”
“I usually do.”
I gather the tablet and disable the room’s temporary shielding. “We will fabricate an excuse to leave after Eon approves Midnight Halo’s recovery break.”
Remy lifts an eyebrow. “You think they will?”
“Public criticism is focused on their decision to let Jules perform while injured. Keeping Midnight Halo out of sight currently serves them.”
Remy’s mouth curves. “So we use their damage control.”
“Yes.”
Remy glances once more at the dark display, clearly thinking about Elodie. “She might run.”
“Then we will have to give her a reason not to.”